


Playing with Matches

by pr0serpina



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Getting Together, Idiots in Love, Klinger is nonbinary just saying, M/M, Multi, Online Dating, Pining, Romantic Comedy, slight bit of medical infodumping
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-16 12:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17549576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr0serpina/pseuds/pr0serpina
Summary: Peggy's crush on her ostensibly gay roommate was never going to go anywhere.  Online dating was just supposed to be a distraction.  She hadn't planned on actuallylikingthe guy.  She especially hadn't planned on him being her roommate's new lover.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onekisstotakewithme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onekisstotakewithme/gifts).



Peggy lets her hair down as soon as the door shuts behind her. Stepping out of her heels, she sighs aloud at the sensation of cool wood against the aching balls of her feet. The couch invites her to lay down and brace her feet on top of one of the arms to relieve pressure on her back. It hikes up her skirt to an indecent degree, but her (handsome, ludicrous, witty, mostly homosexual and absolutely not interested in her) roommate won’t care. She can hear him pottering around in the kitchen, chopping something and running water. “Hi, honey, I’m home,” she calls.

Hawkeye pops his head out of the kitchen. “Tough day?”

“Nah, my back just hurts. I would have preferred to not move around all my desks to do my own sweeping for parent night, but budget cuts come for us all.”

He makes a sympathetic sound. “I’m making carbonara; do you want some?”

“Absolutely. Do you want help?”

“Nope, that’s okay.”

“Don’t amputate anything! Unlike you, I don’t know how to fix it!” It's a lame joke, but she says it just to make him laugh, and he does Hawkeye’s unbridled laugh is a thing of joy.

He wakes her from her doze with the scent of cheese and garlic and a warm hand to the crown of her head. “Dinner is served, Ms. Hayden. Do you ever get used to that, by the way?”

She grins. “Shockingly, yes, because if you don’t assert yourself right away, they’ll run all over you. That’s also why I wear heels. All the boys are taller—and most of the girls.”

Hawkeye frowns at her. “You’ll ruin your back.”

“You know I have that stool up by the lectern. I perch on it whenever possible.” She wisely does not mention how much her back hurts right at that moment. “This is delicious, by the way,” she gestures to the carbonara with her fork.

Hawkeye preens. “I’m practicing on you.” Peggy arches an eyebrow in response. “I have a _dinner date,_ ” he grins.

Peggy smiles gamely. “With whom?”

“A resident I met at that citywide conference. He’s in cardio-thoracic—I know, I swore off chest-cutters, don’t look at me like that. And he’s at St. Mary’s.”

“Ah, a good Catholic boy,” she teases. “Francis will be so proud.”

Hawkeye tilts his head back in a laugh. “Yes, I’ll rush to tell our dear chaplain that I’m but at least if it works out, Trapper can have all the nurses he wants.”

Peggy nods sagely. “Is this your way of telling me there’ll be a sock on the door tomorrow?”

Hawkeye’s eyes widen. “No! Absolutely not. You know I’d never do that to you. I’m going to his place.”

She instantly feels bad for even suggesting it. Hawkeye's always unfailingly courteous of the fact that they share a small, thin-walled apartment. He never brought dates around unless it was really serious. She could count on two hands the number of times she’d met Carlye. When she’d pressed him on it once, letting him know that it was truly fine if he wanted to use the apartment for romantic purposes, he’d just shrugged and said he’d once had a roommate who made him feel as though he couldn’t live there, and he didn’t want to do that to her.

She smiles gratefully. “Well, tomorrow is parent night, so it’ll be nice to get to have a long soak in the tub...”

He nods sympathetically. “You’ll have earned it.”

She hopes it won’t be the case, but past history didn't make things look promising. The parents she most needed to see were the ones who wouldn’t come, and the ones she’d rather swallow a sword than talk to were the ones who camped in her room for the entire two hours. She shrugs. “Part and parcel, my friend. If entertaining parents for two hours a semester lets me do this, then I’ll take it.”

Hawkeye just shakes his head in admiration. “I still can’t believe that of all things, you gave up real estate for high school math. I hated just _being_ a high schooler. I can’t imagine having to be _around_ them every day.”

Peggy chuckles. “They’re oddly charming, especially when you know that there’s a light at the end of their angsty teenaged tunnels and you’re excited for who they’ll turn out to be.”

“Do you ever tell them about the light at the end of the tunnel?”

“And lose my cred as the cool teacher?” she asks with mock horror, standing to collect their dishes. She walks into the kitchen and sighs a breath of relief. Hawkeye's been experimenting with cooking things that only involved one pan, which meant significantly less washing up. She doesn't mind doing the washing up when he cooks, and he does the same for her. Her back just really aches from rearranging her classroom furniture twice. She fills the sink with hot water and starts humming absently.

“Hey,” Hawk hollers from the living room. “Can I ask you a weird favor? It might even help you out, in a weird way.”

“Sure, probably,” she calls back, scrubbing out a coffee mug with rings like rock strata.

“Tomorrow morning I’m assisting on a spinal surgery. I know _textbook-wise_ what I’m doing, but it would help if I could actually see what I’m going to be doing, or at least where it is, and the patient is about your size. Look, can I borrow your back?”

Peggy grins reluctantly. Better now than when he was still in residency. She had spent the better part of two years covered in marker stains. But still...her stomach flutters at the thought of Hawkeye’s strong, slender fingers tracing her spine, and she shivers, then pulls a face at the scummy water. Coveting her only-incidentally-heterosexual roommate is pathetic, and as Margaret has kindly pointed out to her, it's only holding back _her_ (non-existent) love life. She says yes anyway, only because Hawk threw in the offer of a backrub. The voice of her conscience telling her she's a self-defeating idiot sounds disturbingly like Margaret.

This is how Peggy finds herself on her stomach on top of her bed, t-shirt rucked up to her bra, with Hawkeye lightly perched over her thighs. “College athlete, female, aged 19, 5’1 and 125 pounds, presenting with spondylolisthesis and slight spinal stenosis at the T12/L1 vertebrae,” Hawkeye mutters to himself quietly. She tunes him out and tries not to tense as his cold thumbs prod her lower back. “Vertical incision here and here...laminae here and here...trim, fuse base...” Peggy’s mind goes pleasantly blank. She’s peripherally absorbed a lot and knows more about medicine than the average person, but can’t follow technicalities. Hawk’s low drone is white noise. He might poke at her for five minutes or five hours for all the difference it makes to her.

Eventually he sits back on her thighs. “Okay, so,” he says brightly, rubbing at the tight cords of muscle knotted in her shoulders. “What happened is that our patient plays rugby. Lovely girl. Actually, if not for the age, I’d think it was you. Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to take this girl in a fight, assuming I fought people.”

Peggy wants to laugh, but Hawk’s hands are working such magic that she's too worried it would come out as a moan.

Hawk mercifully prattles on. “Sometimes in contact sports the vertebrae will compensate for all that knocking around by actually slipping into each other in a downward direction. So one of her vertebrae is angled inward and down, toward her toes, pushing on the one below it. It’s causing her pain. It’s also making her feet go numb. So what we can do is shave off a bit of her vertebrae.”

“Won’t--” Peggy swallows to get rid of her dry mouth as Hawk digs his thumbs expertly into a knot under her scapula. “Won’t that make her back weaker?”

“Very astute question, but no. You’d be amazed at how little strength has to do with the spine. Think of the spine like...like a peanut.”

“A _peanut?”_

“Yes, and don’t tense your back,” he says tartly. “A peanut. With the shell on. So the shell all around the peanut is the muscle. It’s what makes the peanut strong.”

“So where’s the spine?”

“You know how when you crack the peanut, sometimes there’s some dried membrane-y stuff on the peanut, like a second shell? _That’s_ the spine.”

“Oh,” Peggy says soberly. Maybe she’ll give up heels after all, especially coupled with the fact that Hawkeye is digging the heel of his palm into an especially stubborn knot in a way that's far more pain than pleasure.

“So what we do is shave just a little of the vertebrae. It gives the spinal cord more room, and it also stops the bones from slipping into each other because there’s nothing for them to slip into. We can also fuse the bones together, but it has a lengthy recovery and a lot of side effects,” Hawkeye says in the familiar, almost cheerful tone he uses for narrating medical procedures. Peggy hums in reply.

Hawkeye’s clever hands work near the base of her spine, where she carries a lot of stress, and she sighs in relief. She can feel her muscles relaxing under the warm pressure. He moves into long, slow strokes up and down her spine, settling the muscles with the right amount of pressure. “Well, Ms. Hayden, I think your back will stand up to another day of scrutiny,” he says with an air of satisfaction, and she groans aloud at the terrible pun. “You should stretch more, in my medical opinion,” he chides gently.

“I’m just lucky to have a Hawkeye,” she says sleepily, warm and sated with relaxation.

He laughs above her—not his goose-honk laugh, but something softer and gentler. “I’m luckier that you put up with me, Pegs.” His thumbs come to rest in the two dimples on her lower back, his fingers trailing close to her butt. Her sense of pleasant relaxation evaporates and she fights very hard not to tense. His hands—then the slight weight of him—are gone so quickly that she feels their absence like a negative imprint. The bed dips as he clambered off. “Sorry,” he says quickly. “I just remembered there was something I have to take care of for tomorrow. Night, Peg.” The door clicks behind him.

Peggy rolls slowly over onto her stomach, bewildered, with faint arousal simmering in her veins. _What the hell had that been about?_


	2. Chapter 2

Hawkeye's gone before Peggy wakes up, and she knows not to expect him when she gets home. She learned early in her teaching career to consciously manage her personal life, which is to say that for the good of the order, she tamps it down fiercely from the hours of 7 am to 4 pm (or 7 pm, as the case is tonight). It means that when she has time to process things, they come roaring back like she’s uncapped a shaken soda bottle. This is generally fine; she has a good network of friends and isn’t too proud to cry on the train if she needs to. The apartment she shares with Hawkeye has an immense claw-footed tub that she can fully submerge herself in easily. But she’s barely slept, too irritated with herself for pining over her if-not-gay-then-disinterested roommate, confused at his sudden exodus. She’d shoved it all down to teach all day with exhaustion pulling at her, rallied herself for two hours of sanctimonious parents who wanted her to give out As like Halloween candy, and she's too frazzled on emotion and sleeplessness to remotely enjoy the bath. She hauls herself out and called Max.

She does not ask Max to show up with Lebanese leftovers twenty minutes later, but she should have known better—they hate talking on the phone. “Peg!” They cry, pulling Peggy in for a kiss on both cheeks. “Pearl among women, angel of the educational profession, she of the flaxen hair, caretaker of wayward queers!”

Peggy snorts. “Isn’t that a nice way of saying ‘fag hag?’”

Max casts her a knowing look before exaggeratedly studying their perfectly shaped fingernails. “ _Is_ it? Anyway, I figured that if you haven’t eaten, I’d bring dinner. If you have, I’d bring tomorrow’s lunch. I labeled it so Hawkeye will keep his paws off.”

She grins. “You’re sweet, Max.”

“Don’t tell anyone. I have a reputation to maintain.”

“Anyway, Hawk’s not here, he has a date. Didn’t he tell you?”

Max shrugs, sinking into the sofa. “Probably, but I’ve got so many people telling me their business that I can’t keep up.”

“Fair. Sorry that I called you over to talk about my business,” she says a little guiltily, sitting beside him.

“Ah,” they say triumphantly. “But I can sense that your business, at least, is something that I can help with, perhaps even _solve!_ ”

Peggy sighs all the way down to her toes. Does she really want to do this? Well...no. But did she really want to pine for a disinterested party forever? More ‘no’ than the alternative. She takes a deep breath to steel herself. “Want to help me set up a dating profile?”

Max’s eyes light up like they’d been delivered Christmas early. “Oh, dear one. I thought you’d never ask.”

Peggy covers her eyes and hands them her phone. “Just try to make it at least _sort_ of sound like me,” she begs. “I’d hate for them to find out how boring I really am in real life and be disappointed.”

“This is why you’re letting me do this,” Max says sagely. “Why now, may I ask?”

Peggy curls her feet under her. “Well, you know how I’ve been, as Margaret says, pathetically pining away over someone?”

“Ah, yes. Secret Agent Man.”

“He’s not a _secret agent.”_

“No, but he must do something terribly exciting, otherwise you’d tell us something about him. Anything! His hair color, maybe. Or his credit card number.”

 _No,_ Peggy thinks, _I just don’t want you to realize it’s someone you know._ “Anyway,” she shrugs. “Maybe Margaret’s right.”

“I generally find it’s safer to say so, yes.”

“And maybe I’m wasting my time. I mean, if he’s not interested, he’s not interested. And he’s not.”

“So you have implied.”

“So maybe I should see who’s out there, but as you know, my social circle is you and the hospital gang and oh yes, sixteen-year-olds.”

Max pauses from their tapping on her phone, looking at her calmly, not with pity or sympathy. “I’m proud of you.”

Peggy grimaces. “Thanks, I think.”

“Hey,” they chime, handing her phone back. “Remember that window shopping ain’t mean you gotta _buy._ Notice that I’m not doing any swiping _for_ you. And even if you make a match, it doesn’t mean you have to do anything with it. This is that app where the lady-identifying-person has to talk first, so no sleazeballs.”

True to their word, they don’t comment as she swipes through, only making noncommittal noises unless she specifically asks. She feels shallow and ridiculous making snap judgments based on a handful of pictures and a short bio (assuming the guys managed to fill it out, which most didn’t). She feels mildly vindicated when she sees the occasional guy who is very obviously _not_ the age he claims to be. She abandons the app in favor of Max’s excellent company and largely forgets about it for the next few days. Most of the guys put up a pretext of being interesting and interested, only to ask when they could hook up in ten exchanges or less. She also has a few instances of matching with guys that she was on her way to enjoying talking to, only for them to disappear. She halfheartedly revisits it a few weeks later while she waits for the train. Most of the guys don’t seem like they’d be her type—anyone who lists ‘the gym’ as their hobby is definitely too much for someone whose primary sustenance is black coffee.

And then she pauses. The guy smiling at her has lovely eyes—gray, she's pretty sure—and seemingly more teeth than normal people tend to have. He has kind of a big forehead, but the longer she looks at him, the more she likes it. It keeps him from being stereotypically movie-star handsome. He’s filled in that he's seeking something casual to start, he's taller than her by a margin that would probably be hilarious, and he likes Chinese food and melted ice cream, which are two of her most favorite things. _Oh, what the hell,_ she thinks, swiping right. _It’s a match,_ the app cheerfully tells her. God, being on this feminist dating app meant that _she_ has to talk first. Crap. She shakes her head and tries to play it like she would in person.

_Hi, BJ! What do the initials stand for?_

She regrets it immediately. The guy's going to respond ‘blowjob, obviously’ and then she's going to be so disappointed, because he's really cute. Her phone dings.

_Hi, Peggy. Normally I’d say ‘anything you want,’ and I promise I’d be saying it with a straight face, but it doesn’t come across quite the same in text, does it? So I’ll just tell you. It’s kind of embarrassing. My parents’ names are Bea and Jay. They named me after themselves._

Peggy laughs out loud. Bless him, he's at least as bad at this as she is, if not worse, but he sounds so _sincere._

_That’s okay, Bea and Jay. I’m named after Peggy Sue, like the song._

_See, that’s cool!_ He responds. _You’re named after a girl Buddy Holly loved enough to write a song about._

Peggy blinks in surprise, a slow, reluctant smile working its way across her face. She’s found that generally only people over the age of sixty know the song she's named after. Maybe this won’t be so bad.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the most embarrassingly rom-com thing I've ever considered writing in my life, but I really hope you like it, onekisstotakewithme!


End file.
